hey folks,

my students have had always the problem installing the eclipse c/c++ developing tooling kit [1] on their windows machines. so i’ve decided to help them. i was thinking it should be possible to run eclipse cdt with a mingw/msys installation also from a predefined path, because mingw and msys don’t need any win-registry entries. so i started up my windows xp on the vmware and tried it.

after installing the whole package of mingw and msys (c/c++ compiler, debugger, etc.) [2] to the c:\cdtbundle\mingw and c:\cdtbundle\msys path, i also copied the downloaded eclipse cdt to this path. after launching eclipse, i was really impressed that cdt already knew all the paths 😉 testing it on one of my students machine, we copied the whole directory to c:\cdtbundle. on another machine, the student copied it to another location, so it was only necessary to adjust the workspace path, which was originally also placed at the c:\cdtbundle\workspace folder. unfortunately, the c:\cdtbundle\mingw\bin (necessary for c++ projects, c projects worked out of the box) was not included to the path variable, but it was easy to set it through the project settings. it is also possible to add it through the global preferences at c/c++.build.environment and checked “append variables to native environment” radio button.

7,320 items, totalling 337.9 mb – and you have a working win32-cdt-bundle, even if you start it from your usb-stick 😉

wish you happy coding!

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
[2] http://www.mingw.org/